My profession is BigLaw search and placement. I am also an author (ABA Publishing), speaker, and Forbes and American Lawyer Media contributor. I've previously worked in-house with the likes of Intel, Xircom, and DreamWorks SKG. Along with my Forbes and ALM columns, I can be found in Inc., The American Lawyer, Huffington Post, Venture Capital Post, Fox News Magazine, Lawyerist, Australasian Lawyer, NBC News, The Global Legal Post, Business Insider, NZ Lawyer, and Monster.com, among others. You can contact me directly at dparnell@davidjparnell.com
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Richard Susskind: Moses To The Modern Law Firm

It wasn’t but a minute into my conversation with Richard Susskind–author, professor, consultant, and most pertinent to our discourse, legal futurist–that I was transported in time; not forward, interestingly, but backward, revisiting a trip to a local veterinarian’s office in my younger years…

My mother bred German Shepherds, and our very first went by the name of Mickey. Weighing in at 120 pounds, for a purebred, stud Shepherd, he was a massive specimen, and exemplified all of the great things that a dog of his ilk should: fiercely loyal, protective, gentle with children, loving to the family, and playful at just the right times. He was a great pet, and quickly became a part of the family. But eventually, I left for college, and he and I grew apart.

Years passed, and as any pet owner knows, eventually Father Time comes to collect, and if death isn’t natural, one final trip to the vet is inevitable. My parent’s bond with the dog was too strong. They couldn’t bring themselves to put him down. And though I was away at college at the time, I was summoned to shoulder the burden. At that point in my life, inexperience with death and my distance from the dog–both literally and metaphorically–made me feel well suited to carry out his euthanasia. But on the drive to the vet, as I watched Mickey through the rear view mirror, lying down, panting faintly and taking in the light of his last day, reality washed over me. I wept.

Though 20 years old at the time and a tough college football player, the gravity of such a fundamental thing as death was, unsurprisingly, too much for me to control. And as I carried what was the equivalent of a family member to the examination table, I found myself oddly comforted by the veterinarian’s voice. He was an older man, and I can’t forget the stark contrast between his white lab coat and tanned, weathered skin. Primarily a farm vet, he had been around the block more often that anyone cared to count. Death was a familiar visitor to his clinic, and to him, my trauma was little more than a day at the office. He was not without compassion, though, and as we spoke about the unfolding events, there was a calmness about him, an assuredness in his voice, a confidence that only experience and wisdom can bring. He carefully took Mickey from my hands, and for the first time since the ordeal began, my troubled mind found some desperately needed peace from his words.

Flash forward twenty years, and I was having déjà vu. In a British-speckled, Scottish accent, and with an almost eerie exactitude, Richard Susskind was describing the current and impending realities of another fundamental and powerful thing: change. Specifically, we were discussing change in the legal industry, and with a calmness and precision that only a battle-tested industry veteran could exude, for the first time, in a long time, I came to see that for some law firms, the light at the end of tunnel is the sun, and not a train. And as Susskind delved deeper into the subject matter, much like my trip to the veterinarian’s office, I found a bit of peace.

Having personally written a book about failed firms (due out in late April), I am terribly aware of the monsters that await the legal profession; a reality that will come to bear with or without permission from the legal Titans. Despite the clouds gathering on the horizon, much of today’s legal leadership stands steadfast, choosing riskily to meet the juggernaut head on. There is still hope, however, for those guardians of the industry that remain astute and flexible. Below are some of the more salient points of our conversation:

On The Legal Services Act of 2007

David: I’d like to begin with the Legal Services Act [of 2007]. Why do you think that more firms have not gone public in the UK?

Richard: I’m not sure going public is the main issue or the main consequence of liberalization. What’s most interesting, I think, is the entry into the UK market of new entrepreneurial thinkers, new capital, and new service ideas, rather than injection of funds into old legal businesses. I’m clearly of the view that liberalization is a far greater interest to new potential players rather than the old.

By and large, what we’ve seen is not really so much interest [in outside capital] amongst the leading firms, many of whom say they actually have sufficient capital for any of the investments they need to make. I question that because there are many projects that they would never imagine making because they don’t have sufficient funds for them. Of course they’ve got enough funds to fund what they currently do, but the bigger question is: Are there sufficient funds to fund what they have not yet imagined they might do?

But as things stand, the major interest is amongst a small number of innovative, medium-sized firms, and more generally, new entrants to the market who are thinking of new ways of delivering legal services and real excitement to the market place. But why don’t the traditional legal firms go public is the question that’s often asked, and you’re asking.

[Organizations] that go public, often it’s in the interest of a small number of owners who want to benefit from it. But often, it’s a way, of course, of raising capital for major investments. I think it remains the case that most major law firms do not see the need for, or the scope for, major investment. The challenge there is they’re still thinking of their old business model.

English: A photograph of Richard Susskind (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But, for example, an illustration I often give is banks that have been expressing an interest in coming together and undertaking compliance work through one service provider. So a project for a major law firm might be to set up a shared services center that might house hundreds of compliance specialists serving nearly a dozen investment banks. That is not the kind of investment that any law firm in the world could really comfortably afford on its own. But the point is, it’s not the kind of investment that any firm in the world is currently thinking of because they tend to be thinking, what is it we do today, that might benefit from greater funding, and because they haven’t got an answer to that, they then will tend to say, ‘The old model is working well enough.’

It’s hard to convince a room full of millionaires that they’ve got their business model wrong. But it’s not obvious to them that they need the capital. Whereas I’m seeing, actually, if you rethink your business model, if you have radically innovative new ideas over the ways in which you might engage your clients or in which you might resource your delivery, then you will quite naturally see that you need new sets of people; you need new systems; you need to invest in processes; you need to set up perhaps a power plant or a factory to undertake the more routine work.

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